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PRICE, 25 CENTS.] 



—THE 




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Jflorence '^aprb Jotktoook 



Philadelphia : 

ED WARD STERN &^ CO., PUBLISHERS. 

1879, 



The 



71 



• • 




Children 



— BY— 



FLORENCE BAYARD LOCKWOOD. 



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Philadelphia : 

EDWARD STERN (s' CO., PUBLISHERS. 

1879. 

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Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1878, by 

Edward Stern & Co., Printers, 

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 



IT seems to me that any woman who has borne child- 
ren^ and any woman who has loved children^ should 
have something to say about their trainings which would 
be worth the hearing of us all^ — which might help us. 
The training of children is the business of our sex — as a 
sex — distinct from any individual special gifts or powers 
we may possess as individual women ; and I think we 
all demand from a woman, if she has children to train, 
to do it well ; we all feel as if she may do other things, 
but must do this thing. As the stern old King in the 
" Princess ^^ tells us, ^^ The bearing and rearing of a 
child are woman^s wisdom/^ 

It is something in which we, any of us, are entitled 
to excel, — Si great universal vocation of which we are 
all possessed, underlying whatever individuality we may 
each be endowed with. So I think I may speak to you 
about it, just because, only because, I am myself a woman 
and a mother. Either title would qualify me to speak, 
and both united make it, in my eyes, essential that I 
should have thought and felt deeply on the subject. 

I know very well that, in one sense, theories go but 
a little way in the training of children. After it is all 
said, we must admit that it is what we are, rather than 
what we say, that moulds the child^s character. Yet, it 



4 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 

seems to me that rules of conduct based on principles 
are a great help^ in that they lend a certain harmony, 
which belongs to system and law, to the training of the 
child, which otherwise it cannot have. I do not think 
all children should be treated and trained alike. I 
think rules should be made to fit, and applications to 
suit, the individual character of each child — but I think 
they should all spring from the same broad underlying 
ideas and principles, and all aim towards the same object. 
And that object is the first point to decide upon, for it 
must bestow the inspiration and the significance which 
we require to make what would be otherwise spasmodic 
and desultory, into an intelligent and symmetrical whole, 
with connection and sequence in its parts. 

My idea of the object of the training of a child is 
twofold. It is to make the best possible thing of the 
child's whole nature — to enable it to feel, to know, to 
be, the best thing — to do God's will as perfectly as it 
may, but to do this with a reference always to its special 
individual capacities, — to be, not the best worker and 
thinker that you or I could be, but to work and think 
and do towards the fulfilment and ideal of its own na- 
ture. And I think the preservation of the balance be- 
tween these two ideas in training a child the most diffi- 
cult and the most important thing one has to do. To 
impose an ideal upon it, and yet not dwarf its personal 
growth or suppress its individual powers ; to teach it to 
run the race that one is panting in one's self, and yet 



ti 



THE TBAININQ OF CHILDREN. 

part company with it at some turn of the road and let 
it take a path which oar feet have never trod, only to 
meet it again when the goal is reached : this requires 
wisdom and faith. It requires one, not so much to 
'^ live again their own lives/^ as I have heard women 
say they did, in their children, but live new lives, dif- 
ferent lives, from their own old ones — to live out ot 
themselves and in another creature, for it is only so that 
one can live in another by renouncing one's self for the 
time ; no two of us have precisely the same capacities, 
and so no two of us have just the same ideal of perfec- 
tion. The best thing you can be is never identical with 
the best thing your child can be. No, not even when 
you see and feel how much it resembles you, how well 
you understand it. Somewhere there is the germ of 
diflFerence, and the germ that makes the difference is the 
one that makes it an individual growth with a root of 
its own, and not a mere off-shoot of your nature. It is 
one of the subtlest and strongest of temptations, to try 
to make one's child an improved and corrected edition 
of one's self, — one's self with the mistakes foreseen and 
avoided, the temptations resisted, with the valuable re- 
sult of our experience of life available and unpaid for. 
It is a temptation to resist, for it is not the best thing to 
do for one's child, even when successfully accomplished. 
Before it is done, some mutilation, some dwarfing must 
take place, and we will have gratified an enlarged ego- 
tism at the expense of the child's individual develop- 
ment. 



6 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN, 

I assume, then, that the object of training is to help 
the child to become the best thing of which it is capable, 
to reach the highest and completest self-fulfilment. 

It is unnecessary to say anything to women, now-a- 
days, as to the need of obtaining a basis of physical 
health and vigor for their children. There is but small 
danger of physiological laws being ignored or sanitary 
laws neglected in the treatment of the children of to-day ; 
at present, indeed, many women make a species of relig- 
ion of it and erect the body into an object of worship, 
so that the securing proper nourishment, proper clothing, 
due exercise and rest for the physical organism, seem to 
begin and end their system of education. I take for 
granted that we all agree in thinking that we should try 
to make the finest creature possible in physical respects 
of our child, so that it may possess all its physical 
powers and exercise all its physical functions, while it 
lives under physical conditions, with the least possible 
hindrance and utmost vigor and success ; that we should 
see to it that it gets what it requires for the purposes of 
full physical growth and development, and that, while 
immature and in process of growth, no drain should be 
made upon its vital energies, to turn them aside from 
their natural physical channels. But quite apart from 
health and bodily training, there are a few ideas to 
which I would like to call your attention ; ideas which, 
it seems to me, ought to underlie the whole moral and 
mental training of children. I have thought that many, 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 7 

very many, of the difficulties one meets with, the fail- 
ures one saddens over, in the training of children, might 
be lessened and diminished if these principles were car- 
ried out by mothers. 

And the first of these ideas is the importance of our 
gaining a just and true conception of the value and 
meaning and intention of obedience. One often hears 
it said that obedience is " the thing ^^ to get from our 
children, and that to perfectly obtain it, should be the 
object of all our training. To my mind this is a mani- 
fest fallacy. Obedience is not a result, it is a method 
of attaining a result, a means to an end, not the end 
itself. We enforce obedience that we may make a step- 
ping-stone of it to our object, which is the development 
in all noble ways of the child^s character. If we were 
dealing with a puppy or a kitten, it were different. 
When we have taught the animal to obey us, its edu- 
cation is completed. Obedience is our end and object, 
and when achieved, there is nothing to desire further. 
But we do not regard our children as creatures to be 
trained with a single eye to our own convenience and 
amusement, nor yet as creatures whose development, 
like that of an animal, is confined within easily seen 
limits. Obedience in itself is not the end we aim at 
with a child. There is no intrinsic benefit to be gained 
for it in the mere fact that our will controls its will. 
That fact we try to establish as a means whereby we 
can teach, lead and guide, impress and stimulate. But 



8 THE TRAIXiyG OF CHILDREN, 

I think the mental habit of looking at implicit obedi- 
ence as being in itself a moral act on the part of the 
child, is most pernicious. Of course, I have reference 
to obedience of the child to its parents, regarded as a 
direct and final thing, being its own object; not to obe- 
dience taught to a child as a duty to a moral la^v, speak- 
ing through its appointed exponent and mouth-piece — 
a law, the germ of which exists within the child itself, 
and to which appeal is made by the parent or ruler who 
presents it to the child. The obedience that I object to 
as a characteristic of training, is the obedience that is 
made to overrule and transcend even the very sense of 
justice, the principles of consistent and even truth and 
forbearance, which we ourselves have striven to plant 
and develop in the child^s mind. It is the obedience 
to an arbitrary and unjustified and licentious will, born 
of habit or fear, or, at best, of the abuse of the seeming- 
ingly inexhaustible spring of love and faith towards its 
parents, which exists in the heart of the child. Power 
claiming to be its own justification, is always immoral. 
I have heard it said, "A parent stands in the place of 
God to a child. '^ I say : not so, not for a moment, 
God has a relation to the child, unique and inimitable, 
which He never delegates or transfers to any one ; a re- 
lation which not one of us could fulfil, even in the most 
rudimentary way, did He impose the terrible task upon 
us. 

I recognize the necessity of teaching, yes, of enforcing, 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 9 

obedience^ more especially with young children^ but I 
think that those who do this, with the idea clearly in 
mind that obedience is a mere means, and that they 
make the child obey them in order that they may thereby 
teach it to obey the Sovereign of all men and govern 
itself in accordance with His laws, do it differently and 
produce a different effect on the chikrs nature from the 
person who believes that training it into absolute subjec- 
tion, unreasoning and irresponsible, is in itself an object 
and result to be gained. 

In other words, we create the duty of obedience, 
simply that through it we may obtain the means of 
training the child to be true, honest, noble and generous ; 
but when we forget that it is merely a means, a method, 
and make the securing it our object and result, just so 
far as we do that, we sacrifice the child^s character. 

It is not difficult to obtain an immediate and apparent 
result in training a child, by bending all one^s energies 
towards the enaction of absolute obedience, but I hold 
that any complete result obtained from a child is only 
obtained by a costly sacrifice of its future development. 
Patience and hope are needed to choose rather the frag- 
mentary results, the incomplete foreshadowing of what 
will be hereafter. A child is and should be an incom- 
plete creature, a mere beginning. It is its glorious 
birthright, the very warrant and guarantee that it pos- 
sesses a principle of growth. It is, in all senses, an 
embryo, and we do it an injury when we are unwilling 



10 TBE TRAINING OF CHILBBEN. 

to wait for its natural growth and development, and 
when we try to obtain an immediate and complete re- 
sult. There are harder things to do, better things to do 
for a child, than to teach it to obey you or me ; " obedi- 
ence is necessary, and is the first step,^' you will say. I 
say so, too, and it is just because it is a step merely to- 
wards the goal that I object to making it the goal itself. 
The vitally important thing for a child's character is not 
that you, its mother, or I, its mother, should be able in 
outward ways to do just as we like with it. We may 
trust to inexorable laws to give us all the power and 
influence that we are justly entitled to, over its life and 
nature in the long run. But it is vitally important, of 
the deepest consequence, that it should learn to love 
truth, to conquer itself, to choose the right, to be 
gentle, honest, merciful and just. You will say, "A 
child learns these things by obedience.'' Obedience, 
yes ; but obedience as to what? Not to you, nor to me, 
but to that part of divine truth that you or I have been 
strong enough, and wise enough, and good enough to 
set before it. 

Do not misunderstand me ; I believe in teaching obe- 
dience, but I also believe in teaching it as a tribute paid 
to us as agents, as representatives of a Master who is 
over us, and over our lives as well as over our children, 
and I think, therefore, they should be taught to recog- 
nize the moral element in our commands, that they may 
submit to the arbitrary element of our will. 



TEE TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 11 

If we looked at our children simply to see how to 
make them give us the greatest amount of pleasure at 
the smallest loss of convenience or expenditure of time, 
then it were easily settled, as I have said, by training 
them as one trains an animal, but there is a small moral 
gain for the child there, and a terrible risk of harm. 

^^Do it because I tell you,^^ or ^^do it because it is 
right,^^ which puts our relation on the better footing ? 
Power must have a moral element of responsibility con- 
nected with it, or it becomes mere tyranny. I think it 
should be always implied, if not stated, by a parent in 
ruling a child, that there is a reason for the ruling, a 
right behind it, and that bare will alone is not what we 
bring against the child's bare will, but something 
stronger and higher, which we ourselves obey, and the 
presence of which on our side makes it the duty of the 
child to obey us, even as the absence of it from our side 
would turn our command into the merest exercise of 
might over weakness, than which nothing can be more 
profoundly immoral. 

One hears a great many stories, some of them very 
painful ones, about ^^ conquering a child — breaking a 
child's will /' Does one render it a great service then ? I 
hardly think so. To break a soldier's sword before the 
battle begins will not increase his chance of victory. 
It will want all the will it has before it has done with 
life's struggles, and the best thing we can do for it, is to 
teach it that every action of its will should be with a 



12 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 

sense of direct responsibility to a law which governs us 
equally with itself. I think to make it feel that it is 
not your will alone that you summon to oppose it, but 
your will backed by somewhat which it dimly perceives 
without itself and confusedly feels within itself, is not 
to '' break its will ^^ by an arbitrary exercise of power 
without reason, explanation or appeal, but to strengthen 
and train its will towards making what you cannot make 
for it, namely, a choice of right in obedience, not to you, 
but to the law which should govern us all alike. 

Those parents who claim to be, as so many do by 
virtue of their position, infallible and not liable to err, 
to be the fountain of law instead of its teachers merely, 
occupy a purely artificial position, and one from which 
they must either descend or be hurled sooner or later. 
You must have something stronger and better and 
more perfect than your own mind or will to work with 
in training your child, or you cannot go far. You must 
consent to be God's instrument if you would do God's 
work, and it seems to me that the introduction of the 
element of moral and rational right into one's govern- 
ment of a child, to the elimination of all arbitrary 
power, the being willing to have your child learn fast 
enough to appeal, if need be, from you to what you have 
taught it, the development of a sense of responsibility 
and conscience towards a law as far above you as it is 
above the child itself — is the use and object of obedience. 
This is the harder way : as much harder as it is to slowly 



THE TEAININO OF CHILDREN. 13 

and painfully untie a knot than to cut it ; but that will 
not make us reject it. And when this object is attained 
through the discipline of obedience, when that which 
is at first mechanical is elevated into voluntary and in- 
telligent action, when we have developed a conscience 
and obtained the recognition of a supreme moral law, then 
is the time to make this foundation as broad as humanity 
itself. It is but seldom that a child is not taught to be 
exclusive in its sympathies and limited in its sense of 
obligation towards others — if not in words, then by 
that more potent force, example ; but seldom that the 
word ^^ neighbor ^^ in the great moral law is made to 
stand for, to include in its possibilities of meaning, every 
human creature with whom they may have to do, towards 
whom they sustain any relation whatever, from the most 
passing and transitory to the more permanent and serious 
ones of life. I believe a child should be taught, so soon 
as it is possessed of sense of responsibility, that we are 
all, emphatically and literally, ^^members, one of another/^ 
and that one owes something of this responsibility in 
view of this membership, to every man, woman and 
child, with whom we hold intercourse or have contact. 

When a little child begins life, it is divinely free 
from those prejudices, preferences and narrownesses of 
class, set, nation, creed and party with which we older 
creatures hem. ourselves iu, and within which we seek 
to draw its little feet. The first thing of which a child 
is conscious, when brought in contact with an other 



14 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 

human being, is the thing that it has in common with 
it, never what it has separately from it, — it is what they 
have together, what unites them, that it recognizes, not 
what each man has of his own, and which dissevers 
them ; and it is only after it has lived a while and been 
taught, that it learns to feel the differences and act upon 
them, instead of feeling and acting upon those touches 
of nature which do indeed make it kin with the 
whole world. A little child is the emblematic character 
held forth as a model to the apostles of that faith, which 
alone among religions has enunciated as its corner-stone, 
^' the brotherhood of man/^ 

Many of us teach, " Love thy neighbor as thyself,^^ and 
there is nothing lacking of fulness and fervor, it may 
be, in the definition of the love ; it is in the definition of 
the ^^ neighbor ^' that we dwarf our children's sympathies. 
I think we should aim at giving them a sense of solid- 
arity with their fellow creatures ; on the broadest human 
ground, a sense of duty owed, and kindness and com- 
passion due, to every human thing. We should teach 
them that there is ,no distinction that separates human 
beings so widely from each other that they cannot be 
drawn together and united by that humanity of which 
they all bear the likeness, and that their neighbor, the 
man or woman to whom they owe courtesy, kindness, 
help, may be a relative or a friend, or may be the beg- 
gar on the corner, the shop girl behind the counter, the 
fellow passenger in a street car. Each and all of these 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN, 15 

relations, the momentary and superficial are, even as the 
permanent and deeper one, involving its own measure 
and degree of obligation and responsibility. 

It is a very precious thing that we give our children, 
if we can contrive to give them wide and generous sym- 
pathies, if we can make their hearts great enough to feel 
for the whole world, precious to others and also to them- 
selves ; for the cares and worries of life are more easily 
and lightly borne by those of us, w^ho have early taken, 
what George McDonald happily calls, " that greatest of 
all steps, the step out of doorsJ^ 

To feel beyond and above one^s own petty personal 
interests, calms, rests and strengthens the human soul, 
and we should teach children to do this ; and with this 
universal, all embracing sympathy and love, comes the 
deepest responsibility, for " Love is the fulfilling of the 
law/^ 

If any one asked me to name the most important 
element in the training of children, I should say — first, 
reality ; second, reality ; third, reality ; to be first real 
one's self, and then to teach them to see things in their 
reality. There are many people who would not tell a 
lie to their children for the world, that is they say and 
sincerely think they would not, yet who are always pre- 
tending to think something that they do not think, to 
believe something which they do not believe, to know 
what they do not know, to be what they are not, to 
their children ; who teach that the name is the thing. 



16 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 

not that the thing is itself the fact, whatever name may 
be affixed to it ; who call, indeed, the same thing by dif- 
ferent names at different times and in connection with 
different persons, and who are forever throwing dust in 
the clear eyes of their children. They do not do this 
because of vanity or weakness only. They would tell 
you (for they support the system with argument) ^^ one 
cannot say that to a child ;^^ "of course I always tell 
my children so and so f *^ I never would let them think 
this, that or the other thing of me, or of life, or of other 
people ; it will come soon enough.^^ One is tempted to 
say : the sooner the better, for you are only preparing a 
shock and strain under which many young creatures 
succumb morally, when they find that the real world is 
so different a thing from that unreal conception t)f it 
which their parents have so carefully created to surround 
them with. 

It is answer enough to those who believe that unre- 
ality is the tenderest and best thing to muffle children's 
natures in, that, even if it be desirable to impose an un- 
real self and an unreal world on one's children, it is 
not possible to do it successfully and persistently. 
Children are the most unerring and penetrating of 
observers. No one with whom they hold daily inter- 
course can long deceive them. They are absolutely un- 
influenced by spoken words, by assertion and assevera- 
tion, where these contradict the results of their obser- 
vation of facts and character. Children are naturally 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 17 

inductive in their mental processes ; they are curiously- 
philosophical in the readiness they show to give up a 
theory you may have offered them, if facts of their own 
observation contradict it. They have a necessity to 
prove, to test, to verify for themselves. It is altogether 
what you are that affects your children, not at all what 
you claim to be and say that you are. They understand 
truth, not as verbal accuracy merely, but as what it is, 
reality, — a correspondence between the seeming and the 
being. Let us never forget that we may reiterate again 
and again to our children that we care for and desire 
the best things most, but if we pursue eagerly after 
poorer ones, we have wasted our breath ; it passes over 
them as idle wind, which they regard not, and they are 
influenced, led and guided by what we are, what we 
desire, what we seek, and by that alone. Your child 
and mine is daily, hourly, forming for itself a code of 
laws, a standard of living, a series of rules of conduct 
which will be the future food and support of its char- 
acter and inward life ; for these, it gets its material, in 
the main, principally from you and me, — not from what 
we say, but from what it sees and knows us to be. 
There is no possible way of withdrawing it from the 
influence of our real selves. 

But the argument of necessity is the poorest I could 
urge in favor of being real with our children. The 
real reason for it is the inestimable moral advantage we 
bestow on the child by it. We assure the firmness of 



18 THE TBAiyiXG OF CHILD REX. 

the ground under its feet, thereby ; teach it to see things, 
as nearly as may be^ as they are: furnish it vdxh no 
merely conventional ways of looking at things; offer 
it no explanations of things and ideas that one does not 
one's self believe to be genuine and sound; never blunt 
the edge of its sensitiveness to good, or its recoil fi-om 
evil, by telling it to look at the thing as it ls not. 

You will say, perhaps, that this is putting perplexity 
and discord into the child's mind before it can deal with 
them, and that one should make the world harmonious 
and comprehensible to it while it is so young and tender, 
even if we make it seem what it is not, as well, in the 
process; that doubts, and fears, and problems, and 
puzzles, crowd upon them soon enough, even if we exer- 
cise the mo=t tender care to shield them fi-om such dis- 
turbance to the last possible moment. Yes, let us 
shield them, guard and protect them by all means, but 
do not let us delude them or tamper with reality. As 
for problems, as soon, almost, as a child begins to speak, 
it begins to ask questions to which we possess no ade- 
quate answer, and to which in its fullest maturity it can 
never find one. We cannot help that being so, by false 
solutions and unreal statements. We may postpone the 
day when it accepts the world as inexplicable, but we 
can do no more ; and we can only do that by evasion 
and superficiality, and timid, sometimes false, ways of 
teaching. It seems to me as if it were kinder and better 
to teach it from the beginning that it must live by &ith. 



THE TUAmiNQ OF CHILDREN. 19 

Its time to know is not when it is young and immature ; 
indeed, it may be said to be the birthright of a grown 
human being, as well as of a child, to accept what they 
can never understand. Why should we offer it what 
we have learned to know, ourselves, is a make-shift ? 

Our children are perpetually coming themselves, and 
bringing us, in contact with the greater problems, mys- 
teries and realities of life. There is not one of us who 
has not had a little child to lay its finger on some deep, 
dark, incomprehensible fact and say to us, ^^What is 
this? What does it mean?^^ I say, never belittle or 
strive to diminish the depth and mystery of life to a 
child ; never try to make things that you yourself have 
only found harder to understand and explain, as you 
thought of them, more plain and simple to a child^s 
mind ; — it is unreal, and therefore bad. Do not think 
that it is your duty to reconcile evil and goodness, life 
and death, the working of God^s inexorable laws and the 
flowing of his love, the prosperity of the wicked and 
the suffering of the good man, and make it all clear to 
a chikVs mind ; — you cannot, for it is not clear to you. 
It must begin at once to live in a world of perplexity. 
God made us capable of accepting His laws and resting 
on Him in faith. Let you and me trust Him enough to 
believe that we can safely treat our children as He treats 
us. As a practical matter, if you have never tried it, I 
think you would be surprised to find how well straight- 
forward reality works with children ; how, when one is 



20 THE TBAISrSlG OF CHILDREN. 

not afiraid to saj, " I do not know why or how/' their 
minds and souls seem to expand in the very presence of 
the mystery which we feared would overshadow and 
crush them. They have so many of our own problems, 
in little, to think over and wonder about, and they are 
just as insoluble in bud as when they are fiilly blown. 
When your child asks you its Kttle unanswerable ques- 
tions about sin, and evil, and suffering, and confronts 
one of our unreal solutions with which we glibly furnish 
it, with some fiict of ordinary life, which pierces its 
shallow emptine^ as with a swori we feel how much 
better it would have been to have confessed our igno- 
rance and proclaimed our faith, than given it a staff to 
support it, which bends and snaps at the first stress put 
upon it. For it is not only that we hinder and impede 
the growth of our children by our unreal statements and 
explanations, but we run the risk of their accepting, 
with their perfect fiiith in us, these shallow, hollow dog- 
mas, and building on them. If they do, the day surely 
comes when some feet of their own experience of lite 
cuts at the rotten foundations, and their whole edifice 
crimibles at their feet. I do not mean this merely with 
referenc-e to religious ideas in their restricted sense, but 
to intellectoal and moral ones as well. It is much easier 
to give a child too much foundation than too little ; in 
one way, one can hardly give too little, for what is really 
valuable and solid must be the result of its own mental 
and spiritual labor; — the work may be slow, but it is 
genuine and sure. 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 21 

One often hears people say " that is well enough to 
teach a child^ all right for a child to believe^ but it 
cannot last/' We should give it nothing willingly that 
is not to last. If it is not prepared to receive the best 
and most enduring seed^ then lets its nature lie fallow 
awhile longer. Much indeed^ alas ! we do involuntarily 
give it — prejudices, and imperfections and short-comings ; 
every mistake, every sin of ours, inevitably tinges and 
taints what we give our children. We cannot get away 
from the solemn fact. It is the expression of a law ; 
we must accept it and face it, and do the best we may 
with it. We can never do some one else's best for our 
children, only our best. 

But children are not one thing and grown people 
another. We are but '^ children of a larger growth," 
the child is '^ father to the man " in every sense, and 
therefore it is that we should look to it that what we 
give them as children will be good for them as they 
grow and it grows from a germ into a plant. You 
cannot give your child a poor, base motive of action 
now, and take it away and substitute a noble, high one 
when you think it old enough to bear it. You develop 
in it that quality to which you make appeal. You can- 
not stuff its mind with what is called ^^ milk for babes/' 
in the way of false religious and moral statements as to 
the grave things of life, and then substitute a more in- 
telligent and a more honest system of religion and mo- 
rality later on. The impressions made on a child are 



22 THE TBAIXIXG OF CHILDREN. 

the deepest and most tenacious ever made; we are told, 
^' they are wax to receive and marble to retain.'^ If we 
think that it will be as easy for them to unlearn as to 
learn^ we make a terrible mistake ; and this is true of 
mental training, true of matters of taste, true in every- 
thing that you can teach a cliild. 

Perhaps I have not made my meaning as clear as I 
might, as to what I conceive reality to ho^ ; all con- 
densed definitions must, of necessity, be only partial 
truths. I mean the habit of seeing things as they are, 
of calling them by the names that express their reality — 
not their appearance or claims. I mean the teaching of 
g child that there is a vital connection between saying 
fkti\ do'tig; that there is an essential correspondence be- 
^^ween profession and practice ; that they must not be 
separated or weighed apart; that people and things are 
what you know them to be — not what they label them- 
■selves as — and more especially that we are what we know 
^ourselves to be — not what we may profess to be. I do 
>iOt think one can impress too deeply upon a child the 
truth that one always tries hardest for what one wants 
most, and that it is absolutely unreal to say to one's self, 
'' 1 care most for, and long after, goodness, truth and 
purity,'^ when one is perpetually choosing to do and be 
things that are neither good nor true. I believe in 
teaching them to look at themselves as they are, to free 
themselves from delusions as to their being a certain sort 
of person because they have said they would like to be. 



THE TBAINING OF GHILDBEN. 23 

or have admired the type in someone else's life or book. 
I think it would be better, healthier and more life-giving 
for our children, if we were oftener to drop the mask of 
consistency, and say to them, when we see them, as we 
do see them, puzzling over the gulf between what w^e 
have taught them is the best to seek, and the objects we 
are ourselves seeking to gain — that we have been lead- 
ing, just so far, unreal lives. Children always connect 
saying and doing, and in this instinctive hunger for 
living real lives, they stimulate us to be what we have 
said we were. If we cannot do the best, let us never 
let them think, for an instant of time, that saying and 
meaning to do can take the place of doing, in our lives, 
or theirs, or anyone's. 

Ah, we make it very hard for them, with our little 
knowledge and our less faith ; for, after all, it is want of 
faith in God that is at the bottom of every mistake we 
make and every Avrong thing we do, either by them or 
to ourselves. We are afraid to let them face the foes 
who have conquered us. We try, by expedients of 
cowardice and dishonesty, to guard them from an enemy 
on whom we have turned our own backs, and from 
whom we have fled ; we cannot trust God to take care 
of his own children in his own world. We have not 
enough robustness, or boldness, or courage in our feeling. 
We are afraid to be real with them. There is another 
thing which is closely connected with this question of 
reality, which seems to me to supplement it ; that is, the 



24 THE TBAIXIXG OF CHILJDBEN. 

importance of giving our children the best of us^ our 
best selves^ our genuine, unaffected selves, surely, and 
also the best of ourselves, always. I think it a great 
mistake to think that the difference, morally and men- 
tally, between a child and a grown person, is in the 
quality of the mental and moral food by which they are 
best nourished. Many people think that nothing is too 
weak mentally, too flimsy morally, to satisfy a child's 
appetite. This is an absolute mistake. You want to 
give it the best kind of food for mind and spirit, just 
as you do its body ; you seek out and obtain that species 
of physical nutriment which is most easily assimilated, 
and which possesses, in largest proportion, those ele- 
ments that furnish strength and vitality to the body ; 
you give your child the essence of physical food. Do as 
much for its mind and soul; don't cram it with crude, 
narrow notions, with here and there a grain of truth, 
but sift out the truth and give it pure and free from 
chaff. Immature as it is, it should have the best and 
only the best. Keep back as much as you think best ; 
refrain from feeding its mind and soul where you think 
it unwise ; but, when you do give, give it the very best 
you am get; a little at a time, perhaps, but that little 
the best. AYhen it asks you a question, an^w^er it as if 
you were under oath and }'our testimony might decide 
the jury's verdict, ^^hen it brings you a moral knot, 
don't cut it with the sharpness of decision and impa- 
tience, but untie it with patience and tenderness. Give 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 25 

it your best hope and your best faith, your most sympa- 
thetic comprehension ; don't give it your weary self, the 
ends and ra veilings of your time and energies, but your 
freshness and vigor, your essence. I think there are 
few women who need fear to be real with their children, 
if they are also their best with them. One sometimes 
sees the whole relation between mother and child sud- 
denly lapse when the child grows up, the only bond 
remaining to hold them together being the indissoluble 
one of strong affection. But where there had seemed 
to be one person, there are suddenly two, and very di- 
verse ones. The child has been its mother's property, 
she has apparently done what she liked with it, but the 
girl is her own property, and if she opens her heart 
and mind fully to any one, it is hardly likely to be her 
mother. 

How many girls (boys, too), one sees, good and well 
brought up, it seems, yet who would never think of 
telling their mothers what they call ^' their secrets,'^ 
nor of asking their advice about any purely personal 
matter, nor of letting them even suspect how they feel 
and think, innocent and natural as those thoughts and 
feelings are, about anything more personal and less super- 
ficial than the shade of a ribbon. 

This crisis may be said to be reached, as nearly as 
one can fix it, for it is sometimes a gradual process, 
when the mother abdicates from the sort of control she 
has exercised over the child from its birth, and says to 



26 TBE TRAIXiyQ OF CHILDREN, 

the girl who is turning into womanhood, '^ You are old 
enough to decide this for yourself, are too old for me to 
insist.'^ The element of arbitrary power removed, the 
two natures spring aj^art. Surely there is something 
radically wrong in a relation which is based on a merely 
provisional system of control. We all know that the 
time must come when we must hold our children, if we 
hold them ar all, by other bonds than those of fear and 
the habit of obedience ; that, if we have not succeeded 
in creating a personal relation between our child and 
ourselves as of one human being to another, with the 
elements of confidence, sympathy, congeniality and mu- 
tual comprehension in it, — that then, so soon as our child 
reaches years of discretion, our part in its life is played 
out, and just when the fruition of our love and labor 
sliould be fullest, we cease to have any real share in its 
existence ; for strong affection, sweet and dear as it is, 
is inadequate to bridge the gulf which separates every 
human nature from its fellows. There must be sym- 
pathy and comprehension, interest and tastes in common, 
for real companionship. If we have not managed to 
make our children enjoy our company, rely on our 
counsel, be assured of our sympathy, and, most of all, 
of our respect for their individualities as distinct and 
different from our own, we must not look to hold them 
when the time comes for them to choose their friends 
and occupations ; and I know of nothiug so calculated 
to bind one humau being to another, with an enduring 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 27 

bond, as the conscioasiiess that that other recognizes 
one's right to think and feel in one's own way, and not 
only does this, but is capable of understanding thoughts 
and feelings other than tlieir own. In the long run, we 
always turn to the person who understands us; yes, 
rather even than to the one who is ready with a flood 
of uncomprehending tenderness. I have noticed that 
children seldom expect to be understood by their parents 
when they differ from them; the mere fact of difference 
of recollection or opinion seems to involve a delinquency, 
and, for the most part, they expect and receive a measure 
of reproof and condemnation, if they venture to say 
that they think or feel differently from those above 
them. There is a sort of moral pressure brought to 
bear upon them in this respect, which, to my mind, in- 
duces a kind of moral subservience which is detrimental 
to the character of the child ; there is something that 
most parents resent, in their child having the audacity 
to think for itself; it wounds their vanity, and the na- 
tural result of their resentment or deprecation is that 
the child learns to suppress its individual tastes and 
preferences and notions, till it is free to express them. 

Yet, surely, we all earnestly desire that they should 
think for themselves. We do not wish to adopt the 
ideas and tastes of others without intelligent, indepen- 
dent consideration. We desire that tliey should have 
what the French call "the courage of their convictions," 
for we know that without courage, convictions are worth- 



28 THE TBAINIXG OF CHILBRES. 

less. But if they are not to acquire it at home^ where 
can they gain it ? Home is the very place^ of all others, 
to make mistakes in, to express one^s crudities, to say 
foolish things and outgrow them. We cannot have a 
full-fledged standard of taste and knowledge all at once 
put into our hands ; if it be genuinely ours, it must 
have come to be so by growth. We want to make our 
children feel that they can differ from us and tell us 
freely what they think and feel, not without our reason- 
ing with them, persuading and influencing them ; not 
without oyr doing all we can to enable them to see 
clearly and wisely as we esteem it; but quite without 
being blamed and reprobated, just for the mere act of 
diflPerence, as if the modelling their whole nature on 
ours, and reducing all its manifestations into uniformity 
with ours was a duty, and the failure to do it a moral 
short-coming. 

The highest proof of love seems to me, not to be to 
absorb and overshadow and stamp with one^s own 
image the thing one loves, but to rejoice in its perfec- 
tions, to respect and honor its individuality, and to love 
it, for itself and as itself, enough never to wish to clip 
its wings, even should it soar above our heads. Even 
suj^posing our opinions eminently correct, what then ? 
They are not fit for a child to hold ; they are valuable 
to us because they represent our progress and growth, 
something earned by our individual labor and experi- 
ence, and so ours. But that f>recious quality cannot be 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 29 

transmitted as a ready-made thing. What is really- 
vital and valuable in our opinions is that they are the 
result of our own mental labor. If our children are to 
be genuine, and have an individuality worth anything, 
they must do as we have done, must begin for them- 
selves and go through successive stages of growth in 
thought and feeling, till their whole nature ripens. We 
can help them immensely, but, I think, not by imposing 
full grown opinions and tastes and feeling on them. 

The two things that help, them most are courage and 
reality ; those are the two best weapons against the self- 
consciousness and tendency to uniformity that prevail 
to-day about us. 

I confess I would rather a thousand times see a child 
with a hearty, undiscriminating appetite, liking vigor- 
ously, enjoying uncritically, laughing immoderately over 
a stupid, ^' funny ^^ picture in a pictorial paper, stopping 
to listen to Verdi^s music ground out of a hand-organ, 
buying a sentimental chromo from a pedler and stick- 
ing it up for an ornament, than see the same child curl- 
ing its lip in fine scorn, stopping its sensitive ears in 
disgust, and acutely criticising the coloring of the 
chromo. It makes me sad to hear children find fault, 
as they often do in attempting to criticise. I think they 
do it because it is the surest way of agreeing with their 
elders, and they are afraid or ashamed to disagree. They 
have learned that there is a certain appearance of taste 
in not liking a thing, and they have found when they 



30 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 

liked it and tried to say why^ that they had not given 
the right reasons^ so they pick holes and find flaws^ in 
doing which they speedily acquire a fatal facility, for 
we all know that, more especially to an immature mind, 
an uncultivated mind, defects are more salient than 
beauties, 

I went to the theatre, not long since, in company with 
a young girl, amiable, sweet and not over bright. The 
performance was a capital one, even to my disenchanted 
eyes, and I found it very enjoyable. In one of the 
pauses, I said to her, '^ How do you like it f^ expecting, 
in reply, an enthusiastic, " Oh, I think it^s delightful !'^ 
with a beaming smile, instead of which, came, " Oh, it^s 
very good, but what a dreadful voice Mrs. So and So 
has!" Yet the same girl confided to me, in a moment 
of expansion, that she had wished, when the curtain 
fell, that the whole five acts could be played over again; 
at which refreshing bit of natural vigor, I smiled and 
forbore to say anything as to what my own feelings 
would have been under those circumstances. Here is an 
instance of what I mean. That girl felt as if a pres- 
sure to criticise was brought upon her by my question, 
and her only idea of criticism being to find fault, she 
did so. It pains and jars one to see, in children, the sub- 
stitution of the analysis of their feelings for the expres- 
sion of them; one feels '' Oh ! why do they not drink in 
the odor of their flowers, instead of pulling them to 
pieces ?" 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 31 

When we repress the hearty^ head-over-heels, undis- 
criminating enjoyment of a child, and stimulate the 
habit of fault-finding, we weaken and impoverish its 
nature. 

Give a child genuineness in its feelings and opinions, 
and courage to express them, and you have given it the 
basis of all sound taste in art or literature. A very 
acute French art critic has said, that the basis of good 
taste in art is absolute frankness and honesty as to your 
likes and dislikes, that you can never have a cultivated 
taste for pictures if you do not begin by admitting to 
yourself what impression pictures make on you, irre- 
spective of the name at the bottom of the frame. I 
think this is true of all cultivation, and so important for 
our children. Teach them to see for themselves, not to 
mind liking the wrong thing, not to like according to 
the tag the world has put on the object ; if they do, 
they will end by being absolutely devoid of real taste. 
We must remember how sensitive they are to our ridi- 
cule and blame, how easy it is to make a monkey or a 
snob, in the way of taste, of a child, especially of a 
child with quick perceptions. We must remember that 
they can never see more than they have the " vision ^' to 
see ; there are inexorable limits set to that, that we can- 
not alter by false measurements. We can teach them 
to make the most of what they have. Let us, as far as 
we may, show them beautiful things, surround them 
with objects worthy of admiration, take them to hear 



32 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 

good music, clever actiDg, read them the best poetry, 
furnish them with a standard to embrace, if they will, 
say to them, ^Hhis vase, this picture, this poem, this 
sonata, are thought to be among the best,^^ but do not 
let us impose it on them, do not let us insist on the ac- 
ceptance of any thing artificial. A false enthusiasm, 
an unreal admiration, is as lowering to the tone of a char- 
acter, as a genuine enthusiasm, a real admiration, is ele- 
vating and ennobling to it. Bad as the nil admirari 
school is, there is something worse in pretension and 
pinchbeck. 

But you may think that my idea of training is. for 
the most part, a negative one, and that I have dwelt on 
what we should not and what we cannot do, rather than 
on what we should and can do for our children. As- 
suredly, I believe profoundly in permitting spontaneous 
growth as far as is consistent with the rights of others, 
and that much more of our duty consists in guiding and 
watching, than in constraining and moulding. Also, I 
think we should have a lively recollection of our own 
imperfections, when we are striving to impose our own 
ideals of perfection on them, remembering always^ with 
Dorothea, in Middlemarch, " that if we had been better ^ 
and known better , we might have done better,^^ 

But, with all our inevitable shortcomings, all our mis- 
takes and failures, there remains one thing which the 
most imperfect of us all can still do for her children, 
and that is so great and infinitely good a thing that it 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 33 

seems to compensate for everything that we omit to do 
and everything that we do badly. This thing I take 
to be the giving our children a living faith in the exist- 
ence of a personal God, and a sense of their personal 
responsibility to Him, growing out of their personal 
relation to Him. 

If we do this for them, and I believe it rests with us 
to do or not to do it, then I think we shall have done 
the best thing one human being can do for another, and 
we may rest content. Let us consider what we do for 
them when we make our children religious, for this is 
what I mean by religion. To begin with, it is only by 
a positive and vital realization of the existence of su- 
preme and immutable good, that one is enabled to face 
successfully the positive evil in the world. Evil is too 
real a thing to be met and vanquished by any negative 
notion or partial power. To be able to support the 
crushing weight of the sin and wrong about us, we must 
have something equally real and stronger, behind and 
above us ; we must have a God to fall back upon. The 
gleams of goodness and flashes of virtue that we see in 
our fellow creatures are not enough ; we must have an 
ideal, real perfection, a concrete thing from which all 
our individual ideals radiate, as from a central sun. 
We want more than just an idea, a suggestion, a shadow, 
of goodness and holiness and perfection. We want to 
believe that somewhere exists the Being from whom the 
ideas and suggestions emanate^ and to adore Him, to 



34 THE TBAIXIXG OF CHILDREN. 

realize His existence ^th a keenness and vitality that 
makes that existence the most real thing in lives filled 
full of hard cruel facts, more real even than the sin we 
committed y est erdav, or the wrong we may do to-mor- 
row. We do not need to make sin real to a child ; it 
fcrces itself upon him very scon, very surely. But we 
do need to make Gcd real to him, to teach him that all 
the precepts we instil, all the rules of action we enforce, 
are faint, imperfect expressions of the will of a Supreme 
Being, with whom the child itself is in direct and close 
relation, to whom it is akin by every noble, virtuous 
im pulse and high prompting it ever knows. The high- 
est and best things in human beings of necessity find 
their spring and source in the Divine Being; just as we 
often say that no one knows the evil in another's heart, 
so no one but God knows all the good. The divine 
element in us can only be perfectly undei^stood by the 
Divine Being. Xo one ever thoroughly comprehends 
a human soul but God, So the child needs, above all 
things, to be taught to believe in the existence of God, 
that he may be as sure that good is and lives and has 
po^ er, as he is sure of the reality of evil. 

TThat is the end of religion? St. Augustine tells us, 
'^ The end of religion is to become like the object of 
worship/' We must all worship something, and in 
doing so with genuine adoration, we do grow to resemble 
it. So a child that is taught to be sure that there is a 
God, and to associate with that conviction an inflexible 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 35 

certainty that goodness, truth and justice exist, not in 
part but as an harmonious ^hole, must learn to turn 
towards that light ever more and more steadfastly, and 
approach it ever more and more nearly. 

It does not seem to me that any rule can ^vell be laid 
down, as to how we can best secure this conviction of 
God^s existence, and this realization to our children of 
his relation to each one of us, how to make him more 
real to them than any material object. There are many 
ways and many methods of approach, and, although 
human experience has touches in which the whole world 
are made kin, it has also an individuality no less posi- 
tive and exclusive. But, whatever way we take, we 
must first be ourselves sure that God is real to us, other- 
wise we can never make Him a reality to our children. 
We may dispense with many things, but not with the 
spark that is necessary to kindle the fire ; a conviction 
has a power that is all its own, and which nothing else 
can simulate. We must be sure that we believe not 
merely in a church and ordinances of worship, not 
merely in this dogma or that dogma, but in a personal 
and living God, whose light lights every man that comes 
into the world. If, when we look about us, we see no 
present Deity, we can never make our children see him. 
Faith alone has the sublime privilege to kindle faith. 

Then again, upon this conviction of the existence of 
God hinges all sense of personal responsibility. One 
cannot hold one^s self responsible to a fluctuating ideal 



36 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN, 

of humanity, which turns and changes with the centu- 
ries. Only in a limited degree does one feel one^s seLF 
responsible to his fellow creatures. The deep and abso- 
lute sense of accountability that we all feel, is felt to- 
wards something which speaks within ourselves, and 
which yet is no mere subjective notion of our own, 
which we feel has a habitation without our spirits and 
above them. 

If we teach our children that there is a real affinity 
and likeness of nature between themselves and this Di- 
vine Being, we have paved the way to their apprehension 
of His existence. If we teach them that justice, truth 
and love are not one thing with us, and another with 
Him, that His goodness is, in all ways, but the perfect- 
ing realization of the ideal of ours, that the very image 
of virtue as it exists in the divine nature, is stamped on 
our natures, and that if we love God and obey Him 
we grow more and more like Him, nearer and nearer to 
Him, that He is, never far from any of us, that they can 
always have a personal communion with Him at any 
time, as real as with us, I think we help them much. 
I think we help them more if we teach them that they 
may find God different and differently from you or I, 
that to some of us he comes in the whirlwind, or to 
some in the still small voice; and, as the late Mr. 
Buckle said, ^^ Just in so far as a man lives up to the 
manifestation God makes of himself to him, he leads a 
true life, and so far as he tries to live uj) to the mani- 



THE TRAINING OF GHILBEEN 37 

festation God makes of Himself to some other man he 
lives a false life/^ 

For the most part^ I think the ordinary introduction 
of a child to a belief in God tends to make the realiza- 
tion of His existence difficult, and its own relation to 
Him a compound of contradictions. The points gener- 
ally dwelt upon, are the omniscience, the omnipresence, 
the almighty power of God, to which are added His ab- 
solute goodness and consequent aversion to sin and dis- 
pleasure at wrong-doing. All these are solemn facts, 
but the illustrations of them are almost always drawn 
from physical and material sources, and are speedily re- 
duced to absurdities in the quick, narrow mind of a 
child, or, if not. that, leave it with an unpleasant con- 
ception, as if all giants and magicians it has ever read 
of were rolled into one, and that one to be really believed 
in. Illustrations in words are precisely the same to a 
child as pictures in a book, they are the gist of the whole 
matter to it, and fix and define its conceptions of your 
meaning, so that it is the teacher who makes happy il- 
lustrations who is eagerly listened to, and who most im- 
presses the minds of his pupils. 

The recapitulation of God's physical attributes, op- 
presses and appals the mind of a child. While, at the 
same time, it instinctively longs to apply physical tests 
to physical matters, it has an early apprehension, gained 
from its own little circle of observation, of the limits 
and laws set about and over the body, and instead of its 



38 THE TRAINING OF CHILDBEN 



gaining an idea of greatness from our illustrations^ it 
listens with its bodily ears^ and is often perplexed with- 
out being impressed. But the spirit of a child has an 
element of infinite comprehension in it, and expands to 
hold the growing truth, and if you talk to it of the 
spiritual wonders of God^s infinite goodness and endless 
power of spiritual greatness, there is no perplexity in 
its mind, or contradiction in its understanding. 

It is a fact, and one which may be tested, that no 
spiritual horizon ever seems too vast and remote for the 
reachings of a child^s imagination ; no tale of spiritual 
help given and strength lent to men, too wonderful for 
its ready credence ; no deed of self sacrifice as inspired 
by God^s Spirit, too mighty to be done among men ; but 
try to bring the greatness and power of God home to a 
child by illustrations drawn from the material world, 
and you at once either belittle the child's conception of 
Him, or you puzzle the child's mind and befog it, by 
uselessly contradicting facts of common experience. 

The only sound way of giving a child an idea of God's 
greatness in the physical kingdom, is by pointing out 
the inflexible and rhythmical workings of His laws, 
through which alone He governs our bodily lives. 

The only method of real approach to the Divine 
Being is a spiritual method ; this we must all admit, 
whatever our respective creeds may be in other points. 
We apprehend and are assured of the existence of God, 
and hold communication T\dth him through purely, ex- 



1 



THE TBAINING OF CHILDREN. 39 

clusively^ spiritual channels. We have the highest au- 
thority for saying emphatically, '' God is a Spirit, and 
they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and 
truth/' 

This, then, being admitted to be so, that our kinship 
and relation to God is through our spirits, why should 
we mingle with the teaching of the most spiritual re- 
ligion ever known to the world, any flavor of material- 
ism? 

The great thing to do, is, I think, to make the idea 
of God familiar, but not mechanical, to make it a thing 
of every day life, and yet in no way deprive it of its 
sacredness and holiness. Religion is not a thing to have 
apart from other things ; it is not a part of life, but the 
spirit of the whole life, something pervading and per- 
meating, not something dissevered and isolated. It is 
surely better to teach a child that all days are God's 
days, and all life to be lived ^^as ever in the great 
Task-master's eye," than that God's service is the 
duty of one day and merely incidental on the others. 
The further we keep our children's religion from crys- 
tallizing into particular formal acts, the more likely it 
is to be a living faith. Above all things, they should 
be taught to make God the central inspiration of their 
lives ; not of a part, but of the whole. There can 
hardly be too little formulating in the religious teaching 
of a child, surely never too much of God's presence 
introduced into its life. 



40 THE TEAIXISG OF CHILDBEN. 

Two things^ specially^ I think should never be lost 
sight of in the religious training of a child : first, the 
danger of teaching it anything dogmatically concerning 
God as he manifests himself in the world^ which its own 
observation of the universe will ultimately impugn and 
contradict ; anything provisional which growing intelli- 
gence and increasing thoughtfulness must reject as un- 
tenable. We need not^ and should not^ dwell so much on 
what God can do, as on what we know that He does do. 
His powers and their possibilities are a field wherein 
speculation the most daring may readily lose itself, 
but may never embrace. It is not by assertions of 
God's power to do what we have none of us ever 
known Him to do, and what our children may look 
in vain to see him do, that we can best impress them 
with a realization of His j^erfection and greatness. 
Let us confine our teaching to that which we know 
he can, does and will do for each and all of us, if 
we desire it. There is a region of which we may safely 
assert that thing which they will never find to be 
false when they test it. ^^ The economy of Heaven is 
dark '^ in physical matters ; the tangle of good and evil 
and their workings in and out are mysterious and inex- 
plicable, unfathomable; but take a child into the region 
of spiritual things, and you may safely bid it count 
steadfastly on rea23ing that which it has sown. The 
fruits of the spirit are no uncertain harvest, they are 
ine\atable and exact, and with no lawless element to 
hinder their growth and maturity. 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 41 

Let us teach them to look for and find God's presence 
in everything that is good and beautiful, to identify 
God with every noble impulse or holy act they know of 
themselves or perceive in others, teach them emphati- 
cally that every good gift and every perfect gift 
Cometh down from above, that everything worth having 
or caring for in the world bears God's image and su- 
perscription on it, even if sometimes defaced; that, 
wherever goodness is God is, and where goodness 
is not, He is not; that justice, mercy and truth 
are elements of his being, and that to love them is to 
love God ; that he is no abstract notion, no nicre idea, 
a compound of power and will which we possess no 
power to interpret, but that he is, in very truth, the 
embodiment of all that we know, or reach towards, of 
goodness and perfection, satisfying our deepest longings 
and highest aspirations. 

Let us teach them that to God only must they turn 
for perfect love and entire comprehension ; that it is 
through that portion of their being which is capable of 
utter sympathy with His, that they may hope to grow 
towards an endless life. 

If we can give them both the sense of accountability 
and of personal freedom of choice, and then help them 
to make that choice, by making their wills obedient to 
the will of God, then whatever else we may do or not 
do, this will remain the greatest thing done, or the great- 
est thing left undone. 









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